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THE UTILITY O. COLLEGIATE ANL ROFESSIOXAL 
SCHOOLS. 



AN 



ADDRESS 



IN BEHALF OF 



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fhratinH at i^t S0at, 



DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, BOSTON, 

MAY 29, 1850. 



BY 

EDWARDS A. 'park, 

ABBOT PROFESSOR IN THE ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. 



Eeprinted from the Bibliotheca Sacra for October, 1850. 



SECOND EDITION. 



ANDOVER: 
WARREN F. DRAPER 

1851. 



n.r^ u^ 



THE UTILITY OP COLLEGIATE AND PEOEESSIONAL 
SCHOOLS, 



AN 



ADDRESS 



IN BEHALF OF 



€^t §mti^ for tIjB :|^rnmntinE nf (CnlbgiEtB ml €^uk^iul 
f tomtinii nt i^t Wmt 



DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, BOSTON, 
MAY 29, 1850. 



BY / 

EDWARDS a/ PARK, 

ABBOT PROFESSOR IN THE ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. 



Eeprinted from the Bibliotheca Sacra for October, 1850. 



SECOND EDITION. 



^ ANDOVER: 

WARREN F. DRAPER. 
1851. 






The publishers of the Bibliotheca Sacra hare adopted the rule, not to publish 
in a detached form any single Aiiicle formino- a part of their periodical. There 
are, however, some very peculiar reasons ■which render it advisable to de-sdate 
from their rule, in printing for private distribution some extra copies of the fol- 
lowing Address. 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by Warren F. Draper, 
in the Clerk's Office of the District Coui't of Massachusetts. 



A N D O V E R : 

Press of W. F. Draper. 






ADDRESS. 



It is a stale proverb that Ignorance is tlie motiiex of Devotion j 
but the true apothegm is that Devotion is one parent of Knowledge. 
There is an inherent affinity between science and vu'tue. God has 
joined them together, and although man has often put them asunder, 
yet the disquiet which ensues from theii' divorce is a sign that nature 
demands their union. Hence we find, that nearly all the universities 
of the Christian world have been founded by the clergy and for their 
use. The oldest colleges in our land were for a long time regarded 
and conducted as the schools of the church.* Of the hundi'ed and 
twenty colleges now existing among us, a large majority are under 
evangelical influence, and their paramount design is to furnish able 

* In his Histciy of -Harvard College, Pres. Quincy sajs that this institution 
'• is jJerhaps more indebted [to the Congregational clergV;] than to any other 
class of men, for eaiiy support, if not for existence." — " It was the frequent topic 
of their sermons, and the constant object of their prayers." — " Its founder was a 
member of their body." — " They denominated it ' the School of the Prophets,' 
and identified its success ^Nith all the prospects and all the hopes of rehgion in 
the Province/' YoL I. pp. 44, 45. On pp. 52, 54, he comments on '• the remark- 
able fact in the histoiy of this college, that a literary institution, founded for the 
instruction of the whole people in general science, should have been fi-om the 
first, spoken of, lauded, and conducted as though it had been a theological semi- 
nary, destined exclusively for the benefit of one order of men ; and that this lan- 
guage in respect to it should have been continued to be used, with few excep- 
tions, during the whole of the century in which it was established, and have in a 
degree prevailed even in our own time.'' — Similar remarks may be made with 
regard to the early history of Yale, and several other colleges.- 



defenders of the Christian faith. Accordingly, a pious man feefe an 
interest well nigh personal in these institutions, and in our forty-two 
Theological Seminaries ; nor, as the spirit of his religion is in sym- 
pathy with all learning, can he fail of a kindly regard for our thirty- 
five Medical Schools, where are to be trained those who ought to be 
spiritual physicians, and for our twelve Law Schools, where are to be 
educated those who ought to defend the laws of God. With the 
persuasion, therefore, that all good and thinking men will desire to 
strengthen the alliance between knowledge and piety, between the 
institutions of learning and the church of the Most High, I beg leave 
to say a few words on the benefits resulting from our collegiate and 
professional schools. 

And in the first place, these schools are monuments to the dignity 
and worth of mind. This dignity and worth must be respected, or 
the doctrines and forms of Puritanism will not be loved. These 
doctrines and forms require a taste for intellectual statements ; for 
pure, naked truth. Hence they encourage a style of thinking and 
writing which fails to interest men of mere flesh. Our clergy, not 
being priests but moral teachers, must depend for their influence, 
under God, upon their spiritual cultivation ; and, giving themselves 
wholly to their work, they must rely for their maintenance, not so 
much on rich benefices as upon the will of the people ; and unless 
the people revere their own inward, more than their outward nature, 
they will give no adequate support to an intellectual ministry. 

But one fault of both our age and our nation is, an excessive 
devotedness to material interests. The inestimable advantages of our 
exuberant soil, our singularly threaded navigation, and our variegated 
extent of country are combined with peculiar temptations to avarice. 
Large masses of our population have immigrated hither for the 
avowed purpose of acquiring wealth. Not even the original discove- 
ries of Mexican and Peruvian gold enticed so many devotees of 
Mammon to the enchanted groUnd, as have been allured to it by the 
disclosures of our modern Ophir. Hence results a danger, that we 
shall become more and more intoxicated with a passion for ceiled 
houses and splendidly caparisoned horses, for goblets and vases of 
curiously wrought metal ; and that our favorite studies will be those 



mos^immediately subservient to the processes of the mechanic. Far 
be it from us to depreciate the arts of metallurgy and engineering; 
but with our researches into the organism of matter we, above all 
men, need to combine the humanities of the schools. Amid the whirl 
of our locomotives, and the jangle of our machinery, and the noisy 
working of our political system, we feel a repose and a refreshment 
in merely looking upon the walls of an institution devoted to a quiet, 
spiritual discipline. They are a memento that the value of money 
is computed by some of om- citizens according to its moral, even if 
they be intangible uses. 

The young men of a republic are apt to be impatient of control, 
and therefore need the hints and the dictatorship of a college bell. 
They are apt to be restless for public action, and therefore need the 
*'four years" confinement to a severe, exact and comprehensive study. 
They are apt to be opinionated and wilful, and therefore need the 
friction of class-debates, the subduing operation of college law, the 
singularly republican influence of college society, where the distinc- 
tion of merit absorbs that of binh or wealth. Apart from the study 
which our learaed schools demand, they are associated with nameless 
and niunberless incidents which discipline a student without liis 
knowing it. His excrescences of character are worn away by his 
intercourse with teachers and classmates, by his experiences in the 
recitation room and on the platform, the occurrences of his sopho- 
more and freshman yeai\ The very contact with college walls has 
an abrading effect, which no one can fully analyze." In many par- 
ticulars he may surpass all other men, but in some particulars a self- 
tauyht, must be an untaught man ; for he has not been overawed by 
the authority, nor regaled by the reminiscences, of those institutions 
which are both intended and fitted to remind us of the treasures lying 
hid in the soul. The man who, like oiu' own TTilliston, consecrates 
his silver and gold to the development of these treasures, honors him- 
self by thus offering up money to the service of mind. He will be 
remembered when mere theological pugilists lie forgotten in their 
narrow graves. TTe name it to the praise of Dr. Calamy, Dr. Bent- 
ley, Dr. Halley, Dr. Burnet, Sir Richard Steele and Sir Isaac Xewton, 
that they made donations of books to Yale College. Dr. TTatts gave 



6 

a pair of globes to it ; lie performed many forgotten acts of philan- 
thropy, but this gift will continue to be recorded as a memorial of him, 
not less than of the school which he distinguished. If Napoleon, 
instead of melting up the cannon of Austerlitz, into a column for 
signalizing his exploits, had endowed some liberal institute for the 
right education of his people, he would have raised a monument 
to the worth of the soul which would also have perpetuated his 
own fame. We speak of Alexander as the Great, chiefly because 
he lavished his treasures upon the Stagirite, and thus bequeathed a 
rich boon to the mind of his posterity. The name of Maecenas is 
remembered not so much for his martial or his convivial virtues, as 
for making his wealth subservient to the mental garniture of a Virgil 
and a Horace. We know but little of Ambrose, the Alexandrian 
Gnostic, but we hold him in lasting reverence because we know that 
he was the patron of Origen, that he published the works of that 
father, and nurtured the tree of which the Hexapla was the fruit. A 
rational utilitarian can easily perceive that to enrich a seminary of 
learning, especially of sacred learning, that learning which does not 
immediately minister to the comfort of the body, which is not directly 
productive of tangible benefits, which exerts an influence too ethereal 
to be calculated by mercantile tables, — such a bounty indicates and 
promotes a refinement of conception, begins with and ends in a con- 
templative habit, which, amid the uproar of our merchandize and 
politics, must have the highest style of usefulness. 

As our collegiate and professional schools pay this deserved tribute 
to our spiritual nature, so, in the second place, they give an impulse 
to popular education. Almost their entire history is one of stimu- 
lus to mind. A gift bestowed upon them, instead of being a sedative, 
prompts them to effort. They are intended to meet the wants of the 
soul, and the soul needs incentives to activity. The small estate 
given by the bishop of Cloyne to found scholarships and provide 
premiums for the more studious pupils of Yale College, has had a 
quickening effect upon men who have well repaid the world for the 
smallest good influence upon them. Wheelock, Dagget, Stiles, Burr, 
Dwight, all of whom were presidents of colleges, John Worthington, 



Simeon and Nathan Strong, Silas Deane, Gov. Trumbull and Gov, 
Treadwell, David Brainerd, Buell, Buckminster, and other educators 
of the people were incited to labor for the annual donation of Berke- 
ley ; they succeeded in their struggle for it, and imparted the im- 
petus which they gained from it to succeeding times. 

It is a false idea that influence mainly works from beneath upward. 
It also descends with power from above, downward. The science of 
Aristotle has affected the lowest of the people for two thousand 
years. The learning of the church reformers has wrought on the 
common mind for three centuries. It is because AYhitefield and 
Wesley were well taught, that they were enabled to move the depths 
of the populace. The multifarious learning of Eichard Baxter has 
given an impetus to the masses for two hundi'ed years ; and his prac- 
tical writings were the means of permanent good to PhiHp Dod- 
dridge, who in his turn became an instructor of the multitude as well 
as of theologians ; and his " Rise and Progress " exerted a trans- 
forming influence on William Wilberforce, who acted well his part in 
disenthralling the poor and degraded from their moral slavery ; and 
his " Practical View " resulted in lasting good to Legh Richmond, 
whose Dairyman's Daughter is now, in more than fifty different lan- 
guages, refining the conception of the learned and the vulgar. As 
with individuals so is it with institutions ; the higher give impetus to 
the lower. The enterprise of foreign missions awakens that of 
home ; home missions kindle a zeal for our own individual churches ; 
these churches interest us in our private families. In the scientific 
processes of ventilating our public buildings, a fire in the attic brings 
upward the air from the basement. Where the university is cher- 
ished, classical schools will be formed to prepare candidates for it ; 
and where the classical schools are prosperous, common schools will 
spring up around them. The college requii-es Ipwer institutes as its 
auxiliaries, and what it demands will be supplied for it. It enriches 
the soil from which it draws up its nutriment. It awakens the spirit 
of education, and without this a State law may appoint masters over 
the ctiildren, but will never make those children scholars, nor those 
masters instructors. Our land is one of competition. If there be a 
college in the capital city, there will be an academy in the shire- 



8 

town ; and if there be an academy near the court house, there will 
be select schools in the neighboring villages. And as no institution, 
so no man stands alone. The youth who leaves his still hamlet for 
the university, induces some of his comrades to follow him, and many 
others to s}Tnpathize with him in his literary spirit. Obvious and 
lasting is the impetus which he may give to the mental character of 
his former townsmen. He teaches their schools, and imparts to the 
tenderest minds the benefits of his own generous culture. TVe do 
not suitably esteem the influence of young men. It was in the 
thoughts of youthful collegians that our foreign missionary enterprise 
had its birth. Some of the pupils in our professional seminaries have 
as much power over the common, especially the juvenile mind, as 
they will ever have. Some of them are precocious, and the most 
important thoughts which tliey will hereafter elaborate, have already 
occurred to them. David Hume planned his Treatise of Human 
Nature before he was tvy-enty-one years of age, and composed it be- 
fore he was twenty-five, and this treatise contains the raw material 
of his more finished essays. At the age of twenty-six, John Calvin 
had published the first edition of his Institutes ; it was afterwards 
improved, but its basis was retained. So in military life, the arch- 
duke Charles was but twenty-six years old when he conducted the 
campaign against jSTapoleon, and Napoleon was but twenty-seven 
when he had subdued Italy, and the hero of Macedon died in his 
thirty-second year. The subsequent life of men does not always 
fulfil the promise of their youth. Of not a few preachers it may be 
said, that their earlier sermons are as thoughtful as their later. 
When the members of our colleges and professional schools, there- 
fore, some of whom have already developed the germs of their more 
matured speculation, go out in all the freshness of a scholar's zeal 
among the laboring classes of the land, especially its ruder sections, 
they must contribute to the education of the people. Nearly fifty 
thousand alumni have been trained in our colleges, many of whom 
have been connected as authors, superintendents or instructors with 
our common and our Sabbath schools. About eight thousand have 
been taught at our theological, and sixteen thousand at our medical 
institutions. During the past year more than seventeen thousand 



9" 

yx)uiig men were convened under nearly thirteen hundred teachers, 
at all our higher seminaries of learning. From the conversation and 
correspondence of so many scholars, there must diverge a quickening 
influence into as many distinct communities. But this influence is 
neither so wide spread nor stimulating as it ought to be, and there- 
fore we aim to extend it, and to purify it, until from these higher 
seminaries, as from the heart itself, there circulate a genial warmth 
through the whole system of popular education, and until this system 
pervade the very recesses of the land. 

It is not solely, however, by direct effort that our learned schools 
give a stimulus to the mind of the community. They do good by 
the very shadow of their towers. Many a young man has been at- 
tracted from the plough to the classic, by merely looking upon the 
groves of the academy. He was a spectator of the scene when 
some of his village friends received their diploma ; and in six years 
afterward, he had obtained a better education than they.* There 
steals forth from the shades of the lyeeum a noiseless influence im- 
buing the mind that is even unconscious of it, w^ith a love of letters. 
Hence we cannot expect that a university at Brunswick or Burling- 
ton will diffuse the same healthful glow among the inhabitants of 

■^ in the Eifth Report of the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Pro- 
fessional Education at the West, pp. 29, 30. we read; " On one such [commence- 
ment] occasion a young man sat among the crowd, and, as he listened, a desire 
to obtain an education Was awakened, and kindled to a flame, and he resolved 
that he would never rest till he had availed himself of the advantages of the in- 
stitution. But his father was in straitened circumstances, and knew not how to 
dispense with the ser\ices of his son till he should become of age. Eor the time 
being the son abandoned the execution of purpose, but his daily labors were 
within sound of the college bell, and every stroke reminded hinl of privileges of 
which he could not avail himself, and served to kindle afresh the fires within. 
Months and years passed away, and when at last told by his father, in the field, 
that he would cheerfully relinquish all further claim on his services, he dropped 
his instrument of husbandry, hastened to the house of one of the profcssoi's in 
the collcgCj and in the space of one hour had completed his arrangements for a 
course of study, and was quietly seated, getting his lesson. A few years after- 
ward he inoiinted the platform, on commencement day, to carry into complete 
execution the resolution of by-gone years, and to awaken similar dcshes in the 
minds of listening youth. 



10 

Wisconsin and Iowa, as among tlie population closely encircling it. 
We might as well expect that the flowers which bloom in Maine or 
Vermont would sweeten the air of the prairies ; that one forest, one 
mountain-range would purify the atmosphere of our entire land. 
The western waters cannot be navigated by steamers all whose en- 
gines are kept at the east. Our higher schools must be near to the 
communities which they would attract with a magnetic power. They 
must be seen in order to become remembrancers of our mental worth. 
Their libraries and philosophical apparatus must charm the eye of 
the loiterers from the adjacent towns ; their literary festivals must 
allure parents and children to come up and witness the refining in- 
fluences of a student's life ; their classic grounds, their rules of cour- 
tesy, the bland spirit which breathes in and over them, must invite 
the inquisitive youth to exchange the toils and pleasures of the body 
for those of the mind. 

Doubtless, there is a liability to multiply our higher seminaries 
beyond the proper limits. In some parts of our land they have been 
thus multiplied. They should not be so numerous as to be equally 
in want of funds or scholars ; as to have but little to do and less to 
do it with ; as to keep their professors hungering after the loaves of 
patronage, and so eager to secure pupils for themselves that they 
will be tempted to whisper mysterious charges agamst rival semina- 
ries. There must be no such unhallowed rivalry among schools 
sacred to knowledge and rehgion. They should be so numerous, and 
it is a great object of this Society to keep them so and only so nume- 
rous, as to meet the demands of the whole country, without interfer- 
ing with each other ; as to be accessible to all young men who ought 
to be educated ; as to provide the richest instruction for the largest 
number ; as to extend their influence into the common schools of 
every neighborhood ; as to reach the lowest minds, and give them an 
ideal of a culture too high perhaps for themselves, but waiting to 
bless their children. 

This tendency to popularize knowledge is, in the empirical view, 
the highest recommendation of literary institutes ; in the Romish 
view their main usefulness consists in preserving the results of pre- 



11 

vious study ; but in the Protestant and liberal view tliey have another 
high design. I remark, then, in the third place : Our collegiate and 
professional schools are needed for the extension of science. They 
enlarge as well as protect its domain ; exalt as well as multiply its 
votaries. Doubtless many improvements are made in philosophy 
and the arts by men who have not been disciplined at the university ; 
but it is in the light radiating from the university, in the atmosphere 
impregnated by it, that most of these improvements are made per- 
manently. A mechanic stumbles upon a new invention, but he would 
not know its importance, were he not surrounded by erudite scholars, 
Wlien a rare phenomenon was detected at Greenfield, its value was 
determined at Amherst. The self-made man is often indebted to the 
university for the materials with w^hich he boasts that he has made 
himself. At least fifty-two of the inventions which are now used 
and prized by the civilized world, were made in Germany, not per- 
haps within the walls, but within the influence of her learned insti- 
tutions. Such institutions enlarge the class of investigating spirits 
that come in contact with each other, giving and receiving acumen 
as iron sharpeneth iron. They secure such a division of labor as 
enables a single mind to concentrate itself on a single department, 
and thus pry into the laws which lie hidden from a cursory and di- 
vided view. By their libraries, laboratories and observatories, they 
excite a truth-loving spirit, and provide facilities for its exercise. So 
numerous are the discoveries made under their influence, that it has 
become as diflScult for men in active life to keep an account of the 
new arts and new ramifications of science, as it is for an American 
adult to keep up his chase after the geography of his country. Once, 
the number of planets and satellites in the solar system, as well as of 
the States in our confederation, was stereotyped in school books ; 
but now we feel afraid to mention either of these numbers until we 
have inquired for the last telegraphic despatch. In the telescope of 
Lord E,osse, which is every year antiquating the charts once regarded 
as the permanent philosophy of the heavens ; in the cylinder press, 
by which a man will publish as many syllables in an hour as, before 
the invention of printing, he would not have written in less than fifty 
years ; in locomotion on the land and on the sea, by an apparatus 



12 

wliich indicates more genius and science tlian were needed for con- 
structing the pyramids of Egypt ; in the transmission of intelHgence 
along Avires that swell with thought and seem to hare as much ex- 
pressive life as the nerves of some men ; in that spiritual process of 
using the rays of light as pencils for delineating the human features, 
catching the glance of a moment, preserving it for years, even when 
that glance could not be repeated by any voluntary effort of the child, 
it may be, who accidentally threw it ; in that ethereal appliance by 
which men have learned to sleep under the endurance of amputations, 
the thought of which would once have overmastered them ; in all the 
secular departments of knowledge there is now a progress, the most 
notable peculiarity of which is that it prepares the way for still more 
colossal strides, — each new discovery opening the door for yet more 
wonderful disclosures, and all of them demanding a new activity 
of mind, and increasing the importance, the necessity of its culture. 
Every acquisition to the secular sciences enlarges the compass of 
that science which comprehends all others in itself. Objective theol- 
ogy has been taught us in a perfect revelation, but men have not been 
perfect in understanding it.* The truths in the book of nature and 
in the inspired volume are incapable of improvement ; but our knowl- 
edge of these truths is progressive. The more we learn, so much 
the more capacious become our minds, and accordingly so much the 
more expanded may be our ideas of reHgious doctrine, and this ex- 
pansion is itself an enlargement of our subjective theology. The 
speculations of every successive age will develop new features in 
those great truths which are to shine brighter and brighter unto the 
perfect day. The central principles of the Bible will be illustrated 
with additional glories, as the Copernican system, though always 
remaining true, will become more and more resplendent with every 
newly found star. The speculations of Adam Smith, Price, Jouffroy, 

* " It is not at all incredible,"' says Bishop Butler, " that a book which has 
been so long in the possession of mankind, should contain many truths as yet 
undiscovered. For all the same phenomena and the same faculties of investiga- 
tion, from which such great discoveries in natiu-al knowledge have been made in 
the present and last age, were equally in the possession of mankind several 
thousand years before." 



13 

and even Betitham will enable some future Edwards to write a more 
transparent " Dissertation concerning the nature of True Virtue." 
Tlie extended researches of anatomists, chemists, botanists and ento- 
mologists are preparing additional leaves for a more convincing vol- 
ume of Bridgewater Treatises. Scattered through the philosophy of 
continental Europe are to be found the germs of a more comprehen- 
sive discussion than has ever yet appeared, on the phenomena of the 
will. Additions to the proof of total depravity may be gleaned from 
the reasonings of David Hume ; new arguments for the Divine de- 
crees from the speculations of Schleiermacher ; fresh indications of 
the sacrificial atonement from the criticisms of Gesenius. We con- 
fide in the truth and in the God of truth, and believe, with our Puri- 
tan fatherSj that the Puritan faith is so interwoven with the texture 
of science as to be ultimately confirmed or illustrated by every ad- 
dition to our knowledge. Its foundations smk deep into the very 
structure and the relations of the soul, and therefore, of all systems 
that of Calvinism should be the last to complain of logic or of meta- 
physics or of any sharp investigation. It never did, and this is one 
part of the internal evidence in its favor, it never will and never can 
flourish where some of its advocates are not reasoners, where they 
are not men. It is in itself strong doctrine, and requires something 
more than milk for babes. 

It is only one century and a half since ten ministers of a neighbor- 
ing colony met at Branford, and each, presenting a number of vol- 
umes, said, " I give these books for founding a college in Connecticut." 
From that college went forth, twenty years afterward, Jonathan 
Edwards ; and among her fifteen hundred clerical alumni are Bella- 
my, Hopkins, Smalley, Hart, Emmons, Dwight, Strong, Austin, 
Backus, Hooker, Griffin, Day, Murdock, Beecher, Stuart^ and others, 
of whom it is not too much to say that they have left the literature 
of the church more luminous than they found it. And the moral 
results which have flowed from the studies of these men, — - the world 
feels them, even if it do not know them. And these results are the 
harvest of which those humble counsels at Branford were the seeds, 
And in a century and a half from this day, among the descendants 
of men who are now subduing our western wilderness, there will 



u 

rtrise-*— such is our trust in God — a sturdy band of pioneers in tlie 
fields of truth, who shall redeem many waste places of speculation 
and make them blossom as the rose. Some of these elect spirits will 
be trained, — - such is our prayer, — in the colleges v/hich are now ^ 
asking that we give to them of our abundance what our fathers gave 
of their penury to the germinating schools of their day. And it is 
one of the noblest motives which can dawn upon us, that in nurtur- 
ing these yet feeble colleges, among a population of quick-sighted 
and far-sighted men, we are prospectively widening the compass of 
all science ; we are making medicine more sure, law more dejQbaite, sub- 
jective theology more extensive ; we are providing facilities for the 
men who are predestined to explain the Bible more clearly, and de- 
velop its relations more comprehensively, and to do for a coming 
age what Owen and Chillingworth and Butler did for their times ; 
we are laying, in silver and gold, the basis of that temple which the 
Spirit of truth is to illumine with unwonted effulgence, and the 
brightness of which is to irradiate all minds. 

The agency of our collegiate and professional schools in widening 
the sphere of science, suggests a fourth benefit to be derived from 
them ; they illustrate the cost and provide means for overcoming the 
difiiculties of truth. Men estimate science the more highly when 
they see the apparatus which is needed for acquiring it. A thought- 
ful spectator of a library like the National Library of Paris or the 
Eoyal Library of Munich, begins at once to soliloquize on the pains- 
taking with which truth has been sought : 

" How many vexations have been endured by the writers of the 
tomes that burden these shelves, in making an exact transcript of 
their thoughts, in remodeling their once carefully-adjusted plans ; in 
erasures, interlineations, and final recurrences to the first draft. How 
many risings of hope have these authors felt, that they had at last 
caught a glimpse of the truth, as of a jewel sparkling in the mine ; 
but how soon have their hopes been clouded over, and followed by 
regrets for toil misspent. Who will count up the errors into which 
the most careful of these inquirers have lapsed in their enthusiastic 
defence of one favorite truth ; the fears which have troubled them 



15 

lest the influence of an entire treatise should be spoiled by some in- 
cidental mistake ; the disappointments which have seized them when 
charged with a heresy which none but an envious, because disap- 
pointed man could have manufactured out of their well-intended 
words. How many of these authors have pined in a living mortifi- 
cation, or have atoned for their free but perhaps wholesome thoughts 
on the rack. How small an advance has been made by any one 
scholar who has wearied himself by night and by day, to reach the 
end of the golden chain." 

The variety of experiences in a single mind, and the multitude of 
different minds which have been needed to elucidate any one doctrine, 
are faint emblems of the cost, and hence of the value of truth. This 
value is also illustrated by the inherent difficulties of science. — It is 
a belief no less common than baneful that the easiest interpretation 
of nature is the best. Truth is said to be simple. In certain great 
outlines it is so ; but in its complete system it is full of mazes which 
no man has ever wandered through. The most common vohtions 
which we put forth, are the most inexphcable. The pathways of the 
planets we may easily trace in the general, but their exact lines of 
motion it is toilsome to decipher. The energy of no single agent in 
nature is the precise exponent of the phenomena occasioned by it, for 
that agent is modified in its operation by unseen forces which will 
perhaps ever elude our scrutiny. The enigmas of science multiply 
as its old knots are untied. A good solution of that which once per- 
plexed us, suggests new laws yet more perplexing. The end of our 
being is discipline. Vexatio dat intellectum. We may dispense 
with a prying examination into the hidden agencies of nature, we 
may make certain comprehensive guesses, which will hit somewhere 
near the truth, — near enough, as we carelessly say, for practical 
purposes ; — but these rough conjectures are sometimes the source of 
fatal disaster. A minute error may invalidate the most important 
demonstration. Vessels have been wrecked by a wrong figure in a 
table of logarithms, and souls have been ruined by a wrong inference 
of ethical reasoners. A single misapprehension of the meaning of 
John Locke, opened the flood-gates of French Infidelity. We some- 
times wish that our Saviour had written a treatise explaining ail the 



16 

intricate problems of sacred science. But as in Ms intercourse with 
his disciples he roused within them a spirit of inquiry and even won- 
der, so in the revelation which he sent us, he left many hints which 
we find it arduous to trace out. And it is a singular fact, that all 
other sciences roll over upon theology their most abstnise questions. 
We have a right to demand that the geologist answer the query 
whether matter be eternal ; and the ontologist, whether it have a real 
or only an ideal existence ; and the psychologist and chemist, whether 
the mind be material ; and the psychologist and the jurist, whether 
man's volitions be fated or free ; but all these scholars regard the 
theologian as responsible for solving all these difficulties. They may 
aid him, but he steps forward as the champion in defence of truths 
which they are primarily bound to maintain. And the followers of 
Augustine and Calvin have ever been foremost in grappling with the 
stern questions which baffle other philosophers. Therefore does the 
theology of our Puritan fathers magnify the importance of those in- 
stitutions which provide means for overcoming the difficulties of truth. 
It insists on extensive hbraries, by which the inquirer of to-day may 
be led into familiar converse with the spirits of all who have gone 
before him, and be relieved from the drudgery of laying over again 
the foundations which have been often laid by his predecessors. It 
insists on generous endowments and permanent funds by which the 
scholar may be sustained in his defence of truth, and not be harassed 
with petty fears lest his barrel of meal soon waste and his cruise of 
oil soon fail. It is often said that such accumulations of treasure 
may be perverted. But we must have faith in God. We must not 
prefer our personal care to his wakeful providence. Certainly he 
can preserve in its proper use the wealth of his friends when it is 
funded for ministerial education, as well as they themselves can pre- 
serve it when it is clasped in their individual purses. It is often said 
that every scholar of the church ought to feel the stimulus of poverty, 
as musical birds should not be too well fed, and as the nightingale 
sings the sweetest when her breast presses against a thorn. But our 
ministers and our professors will be poor enough, without our making 
their poverty a matter of the public conscience. There is no loud 
call on Americans to guard against such an excess of generosity as 



17 

will enervate the studious man. They are rather called to redouble 
their generosity so as to exonerate him from the service of tables, 
and thus leave him free to follow out the sinuosities of science. He 
should not be dependent on the occasional, doubtful charity of the 
multitude ; least of all should he be condemned, as he sometimes is, 
even in our own day, to heg his bread from door to door, and divide 
his attention between the truths which ought to engross it, and the 
collecting here and there of his precarious salary from men who have 
no commiseration for the difficulties of his pursuits, and who perhaps 
endeavor, according to a mournful but most expressive mercantile 
phrase, to heat him doion. His processes of investigation are so mod- 
est, cautious, and therefore slow, that unlettered men in their eager- 
ness for instantaneous results complain of him as bringing nothing to 
pass. They withdraw his daily bread, if he do not hold out before 
their eyes his daily earnings. Under a democratic government the 
poor have some peculiar tendencies to become jealous of the rich, the 
ignorant of the learned ; and, thus exposed to causeless susj^icions, a 
scholar needs the fostering care of some literary institute which he 
can rely upon as an Alma Mater. He becomes faint hearted, -— so 
frail is the virtue of even disciplined men, — unless he be judged by 
his peers, unless he be cherished in the bosom of some enlightened 
and enduring seminary which will animate him, or rather require him, 
to buy the truth at whatever cost, and sell it not for whatever of popu- 
lar applause. He loses his literary enterprise, unless raised above the 
fitfulness of a people who may be swayed by his envious rivals and 
may find it economical to have no confidence in him. It ought to be, 
— but so great is the lingering depravity of even good men that we 
must confess with blushing face it seldom is the fact, — that a Chris- 
tian scholar will be patient enough, or manly enough, or pure-minded 
and spiritual enough to press onward through neglect or reproach, 
the foresight of his own and his childi*en's penurj'-, the daily conscious- 
ness of an enfeebled, sickly frame, — to persevere in resisting his 
own indolence, in wresthng with the difficulties of his science, so as 
to wear out the obstacles which had filled his path ; to force his Avay 
into the temple against the portals of which he liad been knocking 
through long and weary years, and at last to exclaim with the joy 

2* 



18 

of him who announced one of his astronomical discoveries in the 
words which posterity will not willingly let die : " What I prophesied 
two-and-twenty years ago, as soon as I discovered the five solids 
among the heavenly orbits ; what I firmly believed long before I had 
seen Ptolemy's Harmonics ; what I had promised my friends in the 
title of this book, which I named before I was sure of my discovery ; 
what, sixteen years ago, I urged as a thing to be sought ; that for 
w^hich I joined Tycho Brahe, for which I settled Prague, for which 
I have devoted the best part of my life to astronomical contempla- 
tions ; — at length I have brought to light, and have recognized its 
truth beyond my most sanguine expectations. It is now eighteen 
months since I got the first glimj^se of light, three months since the 
dawn, very few days since the unveiled sun, most admirable to gaze 
on, burst upon me. ISTothing holds me ; I will indulge in my sacred 
fury ; I will triumph over mankind by the honest confession, that I 
have stolen the golden vases of the Egyptians to build up a taberna- 
cle for my God, far from the confines of Egypt. If you forgive me, 
I rejoice ; if you are angry I can bear it ; the die is cast, the book is 
written, to be read either now or by posterity, ' — I care not which. 
I may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thou- 
sand years for an observer." 

As our colleges and professional schools are remembrancers of the 
cost of truth, so, I remark in the fifth place, they are useful for their 
conservative influence upon society. Of course they do not nourish 
that sickly conservatism which bars out improvement,^ which clings 
to the false because it is old, and sacrifices the good of the world to 
an antiquarian taste ; not that unbending obstinacy of Moliere's doc- 
tors who deemed it far more honorable to fail according to rule, than 
to succeed on any new plan. They rather engender a conservatism 
of truth, of goodness and of liberty ; a tenaciousness of that spirit 
which animated our fathers, and is the life of all generous minds, the 
true spirit of progress ; a caution against hailing every change as an 
amelioration, but a readiness to accept any amelioration even if it be 
a change. They make us reluctant to innovate without imperative 
reason upon systems which have been established with so much toil. 



19 

They are needed, especially in our Western States, to resist the en- 
croachments of foreigners upon those great principles for which our 
fathers so wisely suffered the loss of all things. 

Their tendency to preserve our language pure, is a fit illustration 
of their conservative influence upon our habits of thought. Hordes 
of Britons are rushing in upon us, speaking a barbarous dialect, and 
corrupting our familiar speech with what the British critic will soon 
proscribe as Americanisms. On the Saxon stock of our language 
wdll be engrafted new German idioms, on the Norman stock new Gal- 
licisms, unless our universities maintain, what in our republican land 
will be, the language of the court. Yale College alone has- furnished 
her Webster, her Worcester, and her Goodrich, who though in un- 
equal degrees are erecting the barriers against an inundation of out- 
landish terms, and preparing the way for our mother tongue to be 
spoken in its purity over this entire continent ; and where the unde- 
filed language of England and America is spoken, there will be a 
healthful religious literature. 

Among inquisitive, sagacious but unlearned men, will often spring 
up adventurers who will detect some one principle of science, and 
whose minds being vacant of other principles, will be absorbed with 
this one. Their favorite, single idea, not being made prominent in 
the received philosophy, is thought by them to have been entirely 
unrecognized. They dream that a revelation has been made to them. 
They form a new school or a new sect. The majority of medical 
empirics are men who seize upon some fact or principle which is fa- 
miliar to the medical school, but is new to themselves, and around 
which as a nucleus they gather the materials of a one-sided theory. 
The glaring discoveries of many theological pretenders have been 
long and well known to the accomplished theologian, but he has been 
wont to look upon them not as gaudy colorings untempered, unre- 
lieved, filling up the entire picture, but as mere individual lines, offset 
by appropriate shadings. Now it is a tendency of our professional 
seminai'ies, to exhibit the complete system of which the empiric's one 
idea is a subordinate part. By thus illustrating the symmetry and 
the grandeur of the entire edifice, they deter short-sighted men from 
seizing at a single stone which falls from it and parading the frag- 



20 

ment as their original invention. They do indeed foster a spirit of 
discovery, but they repress the vanity of it. While they develop 
the sagacious instincts of our Western mind, they will also guard 
those instincts and save them from becoming rampant. They pre- 
serve the results of past investigation, inspire a reverence for them, 
encourage a familiarity with them, and thereby rescue men from the 
vain conceit, that every principle which is novel to their own minds 
must have been unknown to their predecessors. If even Strabo an- 
nounced the existence of a new continent w^hich Columbus discovered 
after it had been visited by the Northmen ; if navigators guided their 
barks by the needle centuries before the modern invention of the 
mariner's compass ; if the arts of printing and paper making were 
not originated by the men who commonly enjoy the honor of their 
first discovery ; if even gunpowder was used on the Hartz mountains 
two hundred years before it was afterwards invented by a religious 
monk in a city contiguous to them ; if the minds of men in successive 
ages are often revolving in the same forgotten rounds, then he who 
is called an original thinker, should not be hasty in claiming the first 
acquaintance with that which an antiquarian may hereafter find writ- 
ten out in some black-letter, worm eaten volume of the college hbrary. 
And as he should not seize at the notoriety of having discovered 
what may be true, still less of having been the first to believe in 
what is false. A singular shamefacedness creeps over him, when he 
finds that the rocket which he has made to blaze in the heavens, as 
if to rival the stars in brilliancy, is made up of combustibles which 
have been used over and over, and are now rekindled simply to evan- 
esce once more with a transitory hissing. So soon as it is proved 
that an error is not new, it is despoiled of its main attraction. Com- 
ing forth armed from the brain of a visionary, it is belligerent and 
seems formidable ; but when it is shown to be a new phasis of an 
error long since superannuated and regarded as too far gone for mis- 
chief, it ceases to be either feared or defended. It may be thus his- 
torically emptied of its power by those men who have access to the 
ancient documents of the church ; and nowhere is, or ought to be, 
such a treasure of these documents as in the libraries of our learned 
institutions. 



21 

Nor is tlie conservative influence of these institutions limited to 
matters of belief. We live in a land which is often st}4ed new, but 
which in reality labors under the inconvenience of never as yet hav- 
ing been made. Therefore, while we are not destitute of profound 
philosophers, we have also many upstarts. We abound with modest 
men, but have, both in our older and newer States, not a few mounte- 
banks. We need seminaries of an elevated character, for the pur- 
pose of checking a tendency to radicalism in practice. When a 
minister has been far removed from the discipline of science, the 
attractions of elegant letters, he has adopted uncouth measures for 
winning the heart to the beauties of the gospel, has attempted to 
drive men in tumultuous, phrensied assemblages to the state of wis- 
dom which is one of peace. His violent assaults on the will have 
resulted not so often from a want of piety, as a want of knowledge 
and taste. If while thus unlettered, he had been shut up to the ru- 
brics and guarded by the canons of the church, his fanatical impulses 
might have been kept under duress ; but while he was his own bishop 
and his common sense was his book of discipline, he needed a 
high Christian scholarship to keep him from falling into indiscreet 
and indecent innovations upon the order of the Lord's house. It is 
the excellence of our ecclesiastical freedom, that it requires, and 
therefore promotes a degree of culture which saves men from intem- 
perate, disorganizing measures. 

Our theological seminaries have been suspected, for it has been an 
effort of modern radicalism to impair their influence by the charge of 
fostering unduly a love of investigation, and diverting the youthful 
mind to polite literature. Seldom, however, have they seduced a 
student into the guilt of too much learning or of too great refine- 
ment, although even this is not the deepest guilt into which the rude 
and lethargic mind of man is prone to sink. But by training the 
pupil to a reflective habit, our seminaries have often restrained him 
from that style of exhortation which is sonorous because hollow, and 
from that wildfire which comes with the crackling of light thorns. 
By the classic taste which they impart, they wither the luxuriance 
of a fanatical spirit, raise the mind above a low, levelling barbarism, 
cultivate a respect for regular discipline, for venerable usage. By 



2^ 

nurturing a love of rational, sedate meditation, they add a dignity to 
the churches, and indispose them to be captivated with the antics of 
itinerant and extravagant reformers. By their permanency, by their 
old traditions, by their historical researches, they bring the good of 
past times into the present, and all, with God's help, will continue 
the good of the present into the future. 

Intimately connected with their conservative influence is a sixth 
benefit which our collegiate and professional schools confer upon us ; 
they are safeguards of our civil freedom. The contemplative spirit 
which prevails in them leads us to expect, and their past history con- 
firms the expectation, that the God of all grace will make them the 
nurseries of an intelligent piety ; and such a piety is the only sure 
regulator of our national politics. The spirit of the political press 
deteriorates and darkens, as the light of spiritual knowledge grows 
dim. The best patriot is the truly Christian scholar. 

A monarch's throne relies upon the influence of a few families, and 
is safe when they are well disciplined. But a republic depends on 
the entire poi^ulation, acknowledges them all as counselors, and 
therefore demands of all, as a despotism of some, that their intellect, 
conscience and will, be virtuously trained. In order to secure the 
requisite culture of the masses, some individuals must be highly cul- 
tivated. They must be in form and gesture super-eminent, so as to 
oversee the mental habits of the operative classes. There must, 
then, be institutions on the Hill of Science, whose light cannot be hid 
from the circumjacent plains. It is true that her fifteen hundred 
newspapers* and her twenty-three universities have not given to 
Germany a liberal government ; but if they be unable to originate, 
they are needed to preserve this blessing, as the radiance of the sun 
though impotent to create is essential to sustain the plant. The re- 
cent failures of the republican experiment in continental Europe, are 
only renewed proofs that her imperial schools have not, as they 
should have, blended the diffusive spirit of religion with that of learn- 
ing. Still the surveillance under which her press and her universi- 

* Many of these have been authoritatively suppressed since this paragraph 
was written. 



23 

ties are kept, for they are guarded like arsenals just ready to explode, 
is a sign of their tendency to introduce the freedom -VN'hich they are 
indispensable for retaining. 

A democratic government preserves its liberty by peace. It is too 
unweildy, too dependent on the suffrages of a slow-moving multitude 
for long continued war. It should prefer an accommodating policy, 
and waive oftener than urge its disputes with foreign powers. It 
therefore requires a popular discretion. It enforces its own laws not 
upon Subjects but upon citizens ; hence not so often at the point of a 
bayonet as by the influence of reason. It becomes the weakest of all 
governments, when the people have not the patriotism which flows 
from a meditative and religious temper. Now the favored haunts of 
peace are the halls of science. Men of all ages and of all languages 
meet here as members of one household. When hostile armies en- 
camp along the Ilissus, they shake hands together from opposite 
banks of the stream. We desire to give our learned schools a more 
controlling influence ; that we may prevent another Mexican war, 
and appropriate the two hundred million dollars which would be 
needed for such a brutal contest, to the enriching and perpetuating of 
all the schools of learning and of peace which our country will ever 
need. 

Our national freedom is linked with our union under one govern- 
ment, and our union is cemented by the spirit of our universities ; 
for this is a considerate spirit not easily provoked by political strifes, 
looking above the varieties of north, south, east and west, or rather 
regarding these topical distinctions as essential to the most durable 
unity. While far the larger part of our Southern and Western 
youth must be taught, if at all, in their own colleges, many of them 
should resort to the older institutions of the East, which have been 
touched by time with somewhat of its peculiar finish ; and the influ- 
ence which many of these scholars bear away to their homes from 
the scenes of their collegiate friendship, will be a bond of brother- 
hood to the distant sections of our land. Our permanent seminaries 
of learning are thus a connecting link between places as well as times, 
remote from each other. They cement in mutual attachment the 
controlling spirits of the nation ; they foster life-long and endearing 



u 

intimacies between the pliysieians, statesmen, clergymen, teachets 
and authors of the older and the newer States, and thus imbue our 
various learned professions with one sentiment, and that a sentiment 
of fraternal regard to each other, and of filial love to our country, — 
our whole country, -which shall stand so long as it remains united, 
but will fall when divided. 

The price of liberty is said to be perpetual vigilance ; but the vi- 
gilance of uninstructed men sinks into jealousy, and jealousy alienates 
those whom the comprehensive spirit of science binds together. Al- 
ready has one man, a son of a Massachusetts pastor, an alumnus of a 
New England College, brought the thii-ty States of our confederation 
into a fellowship closer than that of the original thirteen ; for he has 
braided our national interests together by magnetic wires, and has 
made it possible to transmit an amalgamating thought in a few seconds 
over more than twelve thousand miles of our electrified country. Our 
trust also is, that the rail car will soon fly like the shuttle from and to 
all the extremities of the Republic, and weave our sectional parties 
together as the warp and woof of one enduring fabric, to the praise 
and for the furtherance of that knowledge which, in union with char* 
ity, is a bond of perfectness. 

If our freedom be ever lost, history allows us to prophesy that it will 
be for want of popular intelligence as a help to popular virtue ; this 
vacuity will be filled up by brutal passions ; these passions will add 
power to the military cliieftain ; and this chieftain may have reason 
to regard himself as called of Heaven to prevent the mischiefs of 
anarchy by the inferior mischiefs of his own usurpation. This usur* 
pation may be degrading, but like the usurped sway of Napoleon, 
less hurtful than the tyranny of a murderous po^^ulace. It will pre- 
suppose that the people are deeply debased, and such debasement 
will imply that the press is inactive, and such inactivity will bespeak 
a want of tone in our seminaries of learning ; for these seminaries 
should, like the " lips of the ^dse, disperse knowledge " and quicken 
the understanding ; and an inspired teacher has said that " by a 
man of understandhig and knowledge " the government shall be pro- 
Ion sed. 



25 

But our collegiate and professional schools not only tend to pre- 
serve our national freedom ; I remark in the last place, they promote 
our national honor and influence. The representatives of a monarchy, 
like the Prussian, are the accomplished men who have been trained 
for oflice from early childhood, and are qualified to reflect lustre on 
the throne which has irradiated them with its favor. The mass of 
the subjects are degraded, and if they were made conspicuous, would 
cover their land with ignominy. Here and there a traveller spies 
out their debasement ; while to the observer from afar, they are like 
the vallies lying deeply hidden between the mountains which send up " 
their pure summits to gladden his eye. But in our laud, the repre- 
sentatives of the people are the people themselves. Every man 
may become an editor, without a license from the government, and 
his press, however coarse, is regarded as a specimen of American 
literature. Every citizen may climb up to a seat in the legislative 
hall, and while there he becomes a spectacle to foreign critics, is 
watched as one of our rulers, is compared or rather contrasted with 
the lords and princes of a refined European court. If the press of 
any other land were as free as ours, it would be as vituperative ; but 
our liberty exposes the malice which, under a severe censorship, cor- 
rodes in secret. In process of time the known evil becomes less 
perilous than the hidden one, but for the present is more disgraceful. 
The recent debates in the French Assembly demonstrate, that where- 
ever an iU-taught people select their own representatives, and the 
representatives have a license to manifest their inward- feelings, there 
will be as much broad-mouthed vulgarity, as in our own Congress 
even ; but where the speech of men is restrained by law, their malig- 
nant passions will be kept smouldering in their bosoms, wiU be gath- 
ering force to burst out in a revolutionary carnage ; and in the stillness 
which precedes this convulsion, all the national developments will be 
respectable and decorous. It is doubtless true, that no equal propor- 
tion of men on the globe are so generally instructed as our free-born 
citizens ; but it is also true, that we have a smaller number of highly 
finished scholars than are to be found in many other lands. A larger 
vai'iety of elaborate volumes are annually published in a single Ger- 
man province, than in our whole country. It is said that the news- 



26 

papers printed in Great Britain in a single year, if formed into a 
belt of a foot in width, might encircle the earth at the equator nearly 
six times. Our , newspapers, although more numerous, are on the 
whole less reputable than hers, and our inferiority to her is greater 
still in the number and value of our scientific treatises. Our thirty 
thousand clergymen are, as a class, far less fitted to adorn the litera- 
ture of their profession, than are the Saxon or Hanoverian preachers. 
Some of the brightest jewels in the diadem of England, France and 
Prussia, are their well-read statesmen, jurists, physicians, theologians ; 
their elegant w^riters, their living encyclopaedias. Such men of uni^ 
Tersal learning are needed in our land. They would divert the at- 
tention of mankind from our expulsion of the Creeks and Cherokees, 
our Seminole and Mexican wars, our repudiation and our negro 
slavery. But the training of such men to represent us before the 
world, would require that we raise the endowments of our Dartmouth 
and Amherst and Williams to an equality with those of Oxford, 
Gottingen and the Sorbonne ; that we no longer allow the public 
libraries of this entire land to contain fewer volumes than are col* 
lected in the single city of Paris ; that we give to our Western 
colleges an apparatus for instruction equal to the vigor with which 
they are prepared to use it ; that we strive to combine the Western 
enthusiasm with more than the Eastern culture ; above all, that we 
beseech the God of science to endue our schools with his wisdom 
liberally. 

The true honor of our nation consists iii its influence on the world. 
We are an insulated, also a pectiliar people, and therefore attract the 
gaze of others. Just so soon as foreign countries begin to reconstruct 
their governments, they begin to examine our civil constitutions, our 
internal policy, our religious, social, and even domestic life. This 
influence of the Model Republic should be preserved. It is a trea- 
sure, compared with which the gold of the Sacramento is but yellow 
dust. The American who educates his own mind and heart, is a 
benefactor to his entire country, for he contributes to the elevation of 
his country's influence. The parent who is generous in devoting his 
material treasures to the spiritual training of his offspring, acts not 
only as a good father, but as a patriot ; nor only as a patriot but as st 



27 

philanthropist, for he not only enlarges the sphere of his children's 
influence, but adds an attraction to his native land, and kindles a new 
light for the darkened nations. The American divine who is enabled 
to sway the prejudices and the consciences of his countrymen, so as 
to make them a temperate and a sabbath-keeping people, is extend- 
ing his power, and this both a religious and a political power, not 
only to the Pacific shores but to the islands of the sea, to the red- 
dened fields of Hungary, along the steppes of the Czar, the snows of 
Norway, and even to the seven-hilled city. Those national benefac- 
tors who deserve the freedom of the city in a golden box, are not the 
heroes of Buena Vista and Cerro Gordo ; but they are the Cor- 
neliuses who conduct our Education Societies, and labor to educe 
from obscurity the select spirits by means of whom the church and 
therefore the nation are to be refined ; they are such home mission- 
aries as amid the forests of the Wabash kneeled down upon the snow 
and dedicated to Heaven the college which then had no existence 
save in their own faith and in the divine decrees, but which was to 
be raised by a prayer-hearing God on the very spot where they 
kneeled for his blessing ; they are the pious founders of that log cabin 
in New Jersey, in which have now been trained a hundred and sixty 
eight occupants of the very highest offices in our land, and more than 
four hundred and fifty ministers of the gospel. Our Education So- 
cieties and our universities are seminal, and he who nurtures the 
growth of one, causes a thousand good influences to spring up as the 
exuberant fruit of a small seed. 

The most thrilling revolution of our times is, that our home mis- 
sions are becoming foreign, and our foreign is turning itself into a 
home field. Four years since, and New Mexico, Utah and California 
might have claimed the patronage of the American Board ; now we 
have received them bodily to our embrace, and we must educate 
home missionaries for them, and thus prepare them for the civil fran- 
chises which we never designed for an ignorant Spanish population. 
Every year a half million emigrants will continue to land upon our 
shores, become at once our brethren, impress on us the duty of pro- 
viding teachers for them, and if we impart to them the true wisdom, 
we transmit a benicijnant influence tlu'ouo^h them to the foreiorn ham- 



28 

lets from the bosom of wliicli they came. A single word from John 
Jacob Astor would give an electric impulse to a whole German vil- 
lage ; and if all his countrymen should find here the spiritual wealth, 
as he found the material, who can estimate the results of their quick- 
ening intercourse with their father-land ! Every letter which they 
wrote would wake up the mind and the heart of an affectionate circle 
to truth and duty. 

Besides, men ©f genius and multifarious erudition are coming 
among us, like exiled princes, leaving none of their treasures behind. 
We welcome them as our instructors. But we must not be the mere 
recipients of their European culture. We should prepare ourselves 
to bestow good as well as to receive it. We should greet them to 
our Puritan homes, enriched as these homes ought to be with the 
treasures of the Puritan mind. We must not tamely surrender the 
character which our fathers wrought out for us through suffering, 
but we must form an American literature, instinct with the spirit of 
our ancestry. Never had a people a surer and broader basis on 
which to erect a temple of national learning. Blended with our men- 
tal activity are all the associations of the ancient Briton, Dane, Saxon, 
Norman ; of the modern Spaniard, Hollander, Helvetian and Roman. 
As our land comprehends all varieties of climate and soil, and there- 
fore if the northern fruit be blighted the southern will supply its place, 
and if disease invade the prairie the sea-board opens its wide-spread 
asylum ; so our national mind embraces all varieties, and by amalga- 
mating them into a solid composite, promises to rise above the one- 
sided developments of a strictly homogeneous people. It is not only 
the imagination of a Shakspeare and Milton that inspires us, but also 
of a Goethe and Klopstock ; not alone the intellect of a Locke and 
Reid that instructs us, but likewise that of Kant and Cousin. As the 
mixture of races improves the physical system, so this variety in the 
sources of mental impression expands the mental view. Under so 
wide a range of influences, and with our national spirit of freedom, 
we can never sit down at the feet of an Oxford divine whose vision 
has been circumscribed by the shores and mystified by the fogs of 
his own island ; nor can we make our theology a miniature edition of 
the German, which needs to be rectified rather than abridged ; but, 



2^ 

by the reverence which we owe to our ancestors and by the solicitude 
which we should feel for our descendants, we must retain that firm 
groundwork of Puritan excellence on which the mind of our country 
has so long rested, and must blend with it the definiteness and preci- 
sion of the Port Royal, the comprehensiveness and genial glow of the 
land of the Reformers, the tact and delicacy of the Italian, the hardi- 
hood of the Swede and Russian, the vigor of the Scotch, the practi- 
cal, mechanical good sense of the modern Englishman ; nor should 
we disdain, perhaps, the humble tribute which the poor, untutored 
Indian is to bring us of an eloquence fresh as his forest leaves, nor 
will we vilely cast away the affectionate and grateful and confiding 
spirit of the African, who will yet make melody with the links of the 
chain that has bound him. 

I have trust in God, that as he kept our continent hidden from the 
European masses until he had made known to them the uses of the 
type and the printing press, and had laid the train for the Reforma- 
tion of the church ; as he sent hither the best men from the most 
enlightened of lauds, who should employ their forecast and reach of 
mind in laying a broad, deep basis on which their successors might 
erect a worthy superstructure, so has he designed this land for the 
comprehensive and variegated activity of his church ; and as he has 
mingled, so he will continue to mingle in it those diversified elements 
which coalesce in the richest and most durable character, and the 
result of which, under a liberal culture, will be a poetry, a philosophy, 
a theology more capacious, more profound, more soul-stirring than 
he has vouchsafed to any other people. A character gleaned thus 
from all nations, will be so versatile, so energetic, as to quahfy us for 
mingling with them all and elevating their religious spirit. As Har- 
vard College has trained forty-one presidents and a hundred and 
thirteen professors for herself and other colleges, and as she educated 
the first four presidents of Yale ; and as Yale College, in her turn, 
has trained forty-one presidents and a hundred and thirteen profes- 
sors for herself and other colleges, and as she educated the first three 
presidents of Nassau Hall, and as Nassau Hall has followed these 
examples and furnished fifty-four presidents and professors for our 
Southern and Western colleges ; so may we hope that the Western 

3* 



3C^ 

seminaries which have already begun their beneficent action, -will ere 
long send forth their hundred teachers for the universities of our 
Pacific shores, and these universities, with all the composite strength 
of Western character, will train still more exemplary instructors for 
the colleges of China and Japan. As the tree of learning has thus 
sent out its branches toward the setting sun, and these branches have 
taken root and grown up as affiliated trees, so the boughs from these 
trees will also take root, and like the banyan spread out their limbs 
to reach the earth and rise again as other trees, and at length fill the 
land with their shade and their fragrance. From Dartmouth College 
have gone out twenty-four missionaries to foreign countries ; from 
Amherst, so recently established, thirty-six ; from "Williams, thirty- 
three ; from Middlebury, have gone only eight hundred and seventy- 
two alumni, but three hundred and seventy-five of these have become 
preachers; and twenty -four, preachers to the heathen. Our hope 
and prayer is that from Cincinnati, Hudson and Marietta, Knox, 
Wittenberg and Beloit, there will come not only sturdier and more 
versatile missionaries, but also numerous teachers of missionaries, 
who shall roll forward the tide of evangelical learning further and 
further, and make our country the spiritual benefactor of the world. 
With the eye of faith I see the islands of the deep sending their 
princes and warriors to the schools of Oregon, and her choice youth 
there becoming princes in the realm of letters, and warriors doing 
battle for the church militant. I see what has long been called " the 
land of the rising sun " looking to the East for light ; and her lumi- 
nous East, — so rapid are the mutations of our intellectual geogra- 
phy, — is soon to be found on our western shores. I see the Brazihan 
and the Patagonian crowding into our Californias, that they may dig 
for knowledge as for hid treasures, and search for that wisdom which 
is more precious than rubies. I rejoice in the mines which our eager 
countrymen are exploring ; for if we send among them the teacher 
who has himself been taught of God, we may hope that the stones of 
the new-found quarries will lie at the foundation of colleges all along 
our western prairies, and that the enterprise which this Dorado has 
awakened will become a zeal to seek out the truth, an earnestness to 
enrich the hearts of men, an absorbing interest in those treasures 



31 

wliicli are without alloy. Not in vain has He who seeth the end 
from the beginning, sounded aloud the trumpet and summoned the 
nations together in this new world. It is to make us a missionary 
people, that he is thus adorning us with the spoils of all countries 
and all times. From the ardent, the sympathetic and the meditative 
temper which distinguishes our colleges, we are permitted to hope 
that God will continue, as he has begun to make them the favored 
residences of his Spirit, without whose life-giving power we are all 
as dead men. From the influence of rehgion upon the susceptible 
minds of our youthful students, we are allowed to believe that they, 
above all others, will be animated with the missionary zeal. In the 
diffusion of this missionary spirit lies our best national influence. 
In this kind of national influence is our highest national honor ; and 
all the honor of ourselves and our nation is and is to be but a gar- 
land upon the brow of Him " born to redeem and strong to save," 
who came to us as the first missionary, and is ever to be our great 
teacher in his school of wisdom, which is one of pleasantness and 
peace. 



PROSPECTUS 



BIBLIOTHECA SACRA 

AND 

AMERICAN BIBLICAL REPOSITORY. 



As these two publications are now united, it may be well to advert to 
some of the principles on which the work will be conducted. It will be the 
constant aim of the editors and of the gentlemen who assist them, to furnish 
essays and discussions of sterUng and permanent value, so that complete sets 
of the work will be regarded as an important accession to any library. Ar- 
ticles will be sought on topics which will be viewed as valuable twenty or 
fifty years hence, in preference to those of a local, temporary or merely pop- 
ular character. The weekly and monthly journals are the appropriate chan- 
nel for the presentation of subjects of a lighter or more immediately practical 
nature. 

The publication will embrace Theology in its widest acceptation, as com- 
prehending the Literature of the Scriptures, Biblical Criticism, Natural and 
Revealed Theology, Church History with the History of the Christian Doc- 
trines and Sacred Rhetoric. Special prominence will be given to Sacred 
Literature. It will be the aim to procure for every Number two or three 
Articles at least, explanatory or illustrative of the Scriptures, direct exposi- 
tions of the text, or discussions in the rich field of Biblical Criticism. Par- 
ticular facilities in some parts of this department are supplied by American 
IVIissionaries resident in Syria and Western Asia, and by travellers in the 
East. /W^ shall endeavor to enliven the discussions of a more abstract na- 
ture by the insertion, in each Number, if possible, of one piece of biography. 
We have the promise of an Article for our April Number, on the Hfe and 
character of the late Dr. Neander, from a gentleman who was for several 
years a pupil of the great historian. 

To a Hmited extent, questions in Mental and Moral Philosophy will be 
discussed, partly on account of their immediate and important bearing upon 
Theology, and partly for the sake of the intrinsic value of the questions them- 
selves. Our space, however, is so limited that we shall not be able to go far 
into this inviting field. 

Some attention will, also, be paid to Classical Literature. Many of our 
subscribers, and some of our most valued contributors, are presidents and 
professors in the colleges. No publication in this country is specifically de- 



voted to tlie classical languages. They furnisli many topics of special Inter- 
est to tlie biblical student and whicli have important relations to Sacred 
Literature. 

In short, the great object of the conductors of this publication will be to 
furnish a Biblical and Theological Journal of an elevated character, which 
will be welcome to clergymen and enlightened laymen, which will be viewed 
abroad as doing honor to the scholarship of the United States, and which 
will directly advance the interests of sound learning and pure religion. 

AndoveRj Jan. 1, 1851. 



The Bibliotheca Sacra and American Biblical Repository 
will be published at Andover, Mass. on the first of January, April, July and 
October. Each Number will contain at least 216 pages, making a volume 
of 864 pages yearly. 

The Proprietor is happy to announce the union of these two distinguished 
Quarterlies, whose titles are indicated above, believing that the talent and 
learning which has conducted them separately to the first rank among the 
Beligious Quarterlies of the country, and contributed through their pages 
an amount of information, of inestimable value, on almost every subject con- 
nected with Biblical Literature, cannot fail, when thus concentrated upon 
the single united work, to render it not only truly valuable, but almost in- 
dispensable to every clergyman and student in Theology, and of great inter- 
est to every enlightened Christian. 

Complete sets of these works are highly prized by those who are familiar 
with them, as the great storehouse of theological treasures, and it is the de- 
clared purpose of the conductors to continue the united publication " so that 
the work will be regarded as of permanent value and an important accession 
to any library. Articles will be sought on topics which will be viewed as 
valuable twenty or fifty years hence, in preference to those of a local, tem- 
porary or merely popular character." 

The increased patronage secured by this union has encouraged the pub- 
lisher to enlarge the present volume, and will, it is hoped, justify other im- 
provements which will materially add to the value and interest of the work, 
while it will continue to be furnished at a lower rate than any similar Peri- 
odical has ever before been offered in this country. 



When not paid till the receipt of the last (Oct.) Number, $4,00. 

If paid during the year, the Pubhsher offers to pay the postage on all 
Numbers sent after the subscription (4,00) is received. 

If paid strictly in advance, the work will be sent, postage unpaid, for 
$8,00. 



NOTICES OF THE WORK. 



" We hail with much pleasure the union of these distinguished Quarterlies, 
\vhich is this day consummated. They are hereafter to be one -work, and do one 
duty for the church and kingdom of Christ, while managed by one editorial corps. 
It is to be published at Audover, Mass. ; the editors are Profs. Edwards and 
Park of Andover, and Profs. Robinson and H. B. Smith of Xew York. It will 
be issued quarterly as before, commencing with January, and though considera- 
bly increased in size, will come at the same price as before. "We have been ac- 
quainted with these works through theu* whole history, and have always perused 
their -jiages with the deepest interest. 

" The Biblical Repository comes down to us richly laden vdth the researches 
and criticism of many successive years, and is wreathed Avith unfading laurels 
fiom its numerous brilliant triumphs over error of all forms, as drawn by igno- 
rance, superstition and tradition, from the pages of inspiration. These successive 
volumes as issued for more than twenty consecutive years, are of inestimable 
Value in any theological library. The Bibliotheca Sacra is of more modem 
date, but notwithstanding, has attained to a growth and strength equally distin- 
guished. During its whole existence it has enlisted pens from different denomi- 
nations of the first eminence, for piety, for literary taste, for metaphysical acu" 
men, and for theological grasp and power. It was very similar in character and 
aim, to the Biblical Repository, but yet, was rapidly surpassing it for ripe schol- 
arship and splendid talent. At the present time, this may be safely considered 
the leading Quarterly published in the country, which pertains to the realms of 
theological literature and science, and to be very highly appreciated, needs only 
to be read, digested and knoAvn. From the union of these works with its Ando* 
ver and New York editors, together with the ablest contributors in the countiy, 
we shall anticipate the most auspicious results. Though more directly descend- 
ed from the congregational denomination, and mainly sustained by it, yet it is of 
a highly catholic spirit, and not by any means unfrequently, do we find articles 
there from distinguished pens of our own. Dr. Sears, Dr. Hackett, and Prof. 
Chase of Brown University, are of the number. If we do not endorse fully its 
views on the ordinances of the gospel, yet its clear, strong and expansive views 
on the doctrines of the gospel we can, and find much in this rich fruitful field to 
charm and profit us all. We -oish it much success in contending for the faith 
once dehvered to the saints, and hope it win find that union is strength."' — Chris- 
tian Clironicle^ Philadelphia. 



" The ' Bibliotheca Sacra ' and the ' Biblical Repository,' both ably conducted 
theological works, have been united. The two works published separately, have 
hitherto sustained a high character for learning and talent, and their union can- 
not fail to make them still more valuable. Without endorsing every sentiment 
that has appeared, or shall appear upon its pages, we yet unhesitatingly declare 
that no theologian ought to be without this work." — Zwt/ieran Standard^ Colum* 
htiSi Ohio\ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




019 737 206 



'^ Bibliofheca Sacra and American Biblical Repositorij, Jan, 185i. The initial 
Number of a new volume has reached us, and we immediately sit down to its 
examination. The first glimpse tells us a union has been eftected of the Ando- 
ver Quarterly with its elder brother of the same family, but now for many years 
a resident further southward and westward. The Bibliotheca enters upon its 
eighth year, and the Repository upon its twenty-first. So that it has returned 
home just at its majoritij to represent again the old homestead. Tlie conductors 
declare it their object to furnish a Biblical and Theological Journal of an ele- 
vated character, which mU be welcome to clergymen and enlightened laymen, 
which will be viewed abroad as doing ' honor to the scholarship of the United 
States, and which will directly advance the interests of sound learning and pure 
religion.' The character of both publications heretofore warrant that this object 
will he accomplished.'' — American Cabinet, Jan. 18. 



" Bibliotheca Sacra and American Biblical Repository. — These two Biblical Mag- 
azines have been united : for which there is cause of much gratitude. — The con- 
ductors of this able Quarterly remain as before, with the addition of Prof. H. B. 
Smith of the Union Theological Seminary. The tAvo Seminaries — Andover 
and New York — are thus united to give to the work the highest character. — 
The present Number is of more than ordinary interest. 

" As a result of the union of the two Periodicals, more than the usual proportion 
of articles on Philosophy have been inserted in this number. To many minds, 
however, this will not seem an objection. Hereafter the subjects will exhibit a 
greater variety." — Ve:rmont Chronicle, Jan. 14. 



"The Bibliotheca is one of those rare and noble periodical works which no 
scholar can miss without loss. It is an ornament and an honor to the Christian 
literature of America. It combines great thoroughness and accuracy of investi- 
gation, with great independence of argument and of thought. While diligently 
enriched by its learned conductors with the choicest accumulations of the Ger- 
man students, transferred into an English style always clear, and usually elegant, 
it gives its readers also the best fruits of the original thmking of its editors." — 
Independent^ New York, Nov. 14, 1850. 



'' This prince of American Quarterlies is before us, and fully sustains its high 
distinctive chai-acter." — Chicago Prairie Herald, Nov. 6, 1850. 



" The Bibliotheca Sacra, conducted by B. B. Edwards and E. A. Park, for 
November, (Andover, W. F. Draper,) abounds in choice and recondite learning, 
with a sufficient sprinkling of popular articles to attract the attention of general 
readers. ' The Life and Character of De Wette' gives an instnictive account 
of the position and influence of that eminent German theologian. The whole 
number is highly creditable to the condition of sacred literature in. this country." 
' — Harper's Monthly Magazine, Dec. 1850. 



K^ A few complete sets of tlie Bibliotheca Sacra are off'ered at the fol- 
lowing reduced prices, viz., the seven volumes neatly bound iii black cloth, at 
$21,00, or in half Russiaj Turkey or Caif, with marbled edges, at $25,00. 

Andover, Mass, W, P.. DRAPEEj PuhliAef, 



l57b7S 
?2S 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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019 737 206 



HolHnger Corp. 
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